Bob Holroyd, one of the UK’s foremost electronic composers and producers, releases his tenth studio album ‘Football Chants and Nursery Rhymes’ today via Six Degree Records. Combining organic instruments and modern sound manipulations, Holroyd creates emotional sound collages and soundscapes, bridging the gap between ambient, neo-classical and electronica. He has made music in both the electronic and ambient fields over a period of four decades and has received hight praise from numerous tastemaker media including Mojo, DJ, Mixmag, RA and Clash among many others over a rich and varied career.
Dispensing with any drums or percussion on the majority of the fourteen tracks across the album, ‘Football Chants and Nursery Rhymes’ is the antithesis of the immediate social media driven world, an unhurried atmospheric journey of organic and electronic soundscapes, sometimes uplifting, sometimes anxious, reflecting the uncertain times we have seen, and are currently living through. From the gentle touches of piano on ‘Beige’, to the post-rock rumblings of ‘The Day Before’ and the haunting fragility of ‘Big Fields’, Holroyd looks to explore sounds, spaces, and everything in between. ‘Football Chants and Nursery Rhymes’ is an album of emotion – a tender, touching album full of feeling and sentiment. There’s a reflective beauty to the emotive ‘Straight Jacket’ while swathes of affecting electronica dictate the flow of ‘Cart Blanche’. Elsewhere, ‘Capture’ flickers on the edge of melody and ambience and the minimalistic classicism of ‘Ship Sailed’ and ‘Mangled Pianos’ show a musician capable of remarkable tenderness.
Cult club classics ‘African Drug’, ‘Drumming Up A Storm’ and ‘The Day Before’ put one foot firmly on the dancefloor and as a result, his work has been remixed by artists including Fourtet, Coldcut, Francois K, Joe Claussell, Extrawelt, Nitin Sahwney, Mogwai, Synkro, CASSIMM, Steve Roach and The Album Leaf. His more recent work, including the critically acclaimed 2018 album ‘The Cage’, has essentially explored ambient, textural spaces incorporating elements of neoclassical, jazz and found sounds. Holroyd’s music has also been used extensively for film and TV including the Warner Bros. Pictures production The Dark Knight directed by Christopher Nolan, the hugely successful TV series’ The Sopranos, True Blood and Lost and the multi award winning documentary Living in the Future’s Past, produced and narrated by Jeff Bridges. He continues to work for various production music libraries including Chappell, Bruton, Grey Man, Zone, and Unity.
Watch video for ‘Low Tide’ here
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